One for the Record Books

The awards ceremony for Baja Ha-Ha XVI — which was, in several ways, the most exciting ever — was held at Marina Cabo San Lucas on Saturday evening. While a record 195 boats signed up for the 760-mile event from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, thanks to normal attrition, there were actually 165 boats and 601 sailors — both records — that crossed the starting line.

Seven of the entries in the cruising rally, which ranged in size from 24 to 94 feet, responded to the challenge of a variety of conditions to sail the entire course and claim semi-coveted ‘Soul Sailor’ honors. The high extremes in conditions ranged from winds of 20 to 30 knots and seas estimated by the Coast Guard — but not by any of the participants — to be between 18 and as much as 30 feet on the second and third days and nights. In the low extreme, it included lengthy calms near the end of the second and third legs. The seven boats and their skippers were as follows: Rudy Heessels’ Beneteau 36s7 Wind Child, Pat Mitchell’s Cal 39 Gitana, Craig Shaw’s Columbia 43 Adios, Patsy Verhoeven’s Gulfstar 50 Talion, Paul Martson’s Corsair 31 Sally Lightfoot, Sheri Crowe’s Farr 44 Tabu, and Scott Piper’s J/160 Pipe Dream IX. We salute them all!

Between the extremes in conditions, there were periods of excellent sailing on every leg. During the last evening, for example, we enjoyed some of the most exquisite sailing conditions in our 35 years of sailing. There was a full moon, swimsuit temperatures in the middle of the night, 15 to 18 knots of wind, and a flat sea. With our 63-ft cat Profligate gliding along easily at between 9 and 15 knots under a pink symmetrical chute, the ride was so smooth that we occasionally had to come out of the salon to convince ourselves that we weren’t tied up to a dock.

At the end of each Ha-Ha, the Spirit of the Ha-Ha Award is presented in honor of Steven Swenson, skipper of the Seattle-based Hallberg-Rassy 46 Trinity, who sailed the entire Ha-Ha course with his wife and two kids in 2004, then died in a tragic free-diving accident off Costa Rica a number of months later. This year’s recipient of the award was a foregone conclusion, and was presented to Eugenie Russell, the fun-loving, charismatic, but above all, extremely competent 35-year-old skipper of the Alameda-based J/120 J/World, which sank after colliding with a whale on the first leg. Although Russell insists that she was just doing her job, members of her crew — as well as Coast Guard investigators — said she responded heroically to the situation, which resulted in all five aboard being rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter without serious injury. Capt. Russell received a thunderous — and much welcomed — ovation from the 350 people at the awards ceremony.